Demographic and epidemiological characteristics of major regions, 1990-2001

In an era when most societies are coping with greater demand for health resources, choices will have to be made about the provision of health services. Strategic health planning must take into account the comparative burden of diseases and injuries, and the risk factors that cause them, and how this burden is likely to change under various policies and interventions. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) framework is the principal, if not the only, framework for integrating and analyzing information on population health and making it more relevant for health policy and planning purposes. The comprehensive findings of the 2001 GBD study represent a major update of the effort launched with the 1990 GBD study. The 1990 GBD study was a major advance in the quantification of the impact of diseases, injuries, and risk factors on population health globally and by region. Government and nongovernmental agencies alike have used its results to argue for more strategic allocation of health resources to programs that are likely to yield the greatest gains in population health. Publication of the 1990 results led to improvements in analytical methods and mortality data in a number of countries. In addition, critiques of methodological approaches used in the 1990 study prompted a new framework for risk factor assessment along with systematic attempts to quantify some of the uncertainty in national and global assessments of disease burden. The 2001 GBD provides a new and improved baseline for measuring progress in global health.